You get what you pay for. Personally, I'd get a small receiver from the seventies. Craigslist has them cheap. I enjoy the nostalgia and they are better made. You can overhaul it fairly cheap. And, a big and, the last time I ordered anything from Hong Kong on E-prey, I was swamped with 300 offers a day for Viagra. That's my opinion. Good luck.

Discontinued by the original manufacturer, but I think the Chinese have been producing tons of replica chips since you still see them being sold, with date codes that indicate they were made after Tripath disappeared.

I want to buy this amp because I am curious about them and have heard a lot of good things. I know Tripath went under a few years ago, so I am pretty sure this amp is using Chinese replicas. I dabbled into the world of HiFi many years back, and I still have a really nice receiver left over from those days (a 2008 harman/kardon 3490, 120wpc high current stereo receiver) along with an old Technics Direct Drive turntable and a moderately decent Yamaha CDP from the 90s.

I don't expect this to be a solid, timeless piece of audio gear like some of the really good 70s stuff. I'm just intrigued that you can get good audio out of such a small package. A marvel of modern engineering IMO.

My h/k receiver delivers a shitlode of high current, warm, rich audio. It is also a huge (for this day and age) piece of gear. This T-amp promises to be the opposite of that. Low wattage, and the reviews for other TA2020/2021-based amps claim that these little guys output exactly what you put into them - very neutral, natural sound.

This isn't as much of a "I want some good audio gear" purchase, more of a "oh shit this is cool, I wonder what it sounds like?"

I have one of these which I modded to the max and found it excellent.
I replaced it with a pair of 300b monoblocks, chalk and cheese but the old T amp was good all the same. Efficient speakers are a must to not push it too hard.

I would not want a receiver from the 70s as a substitute. It would have more features but it is a maintenance issue with old potentiometers, dried up capacitors, years of residue buildup on contacts, complexity making repair difficult if your don't have the schematic or can source/know replacement values for output transistors, etc... and watt per watt they consume a lot more power.

This little amp, it looks nice and you're paying extra for that but it is doubtful you'll hear much sonic difference.

REMEMBER it is not 25W output into 8ohm speakers with 12V power supply! Even for bookshelf speakers if you want to turn the volume up every now and then you may find it struggles with bass notes.

I'm going to ignore the output for 10% THD, you DON'T want to be at 10% THD. Being generous and letting THD be as high as 1%, see the graph on first page of datasheet. Let's also assume your 8 ohm speakers dip down to about 6 ohms giving an even higher wattage number on the graph. Result is:

13W output @ 1% THD into ~ 6 ohms with a 13.5V, not 12.0V power supply. I highly recommend using a 13.5V to 14.5V power supply, even if you have to use a 15V PSU (to get a common value if your PSU isn't one with adjustable output) and put a silicon diode in series on its output to drop it down to about 14.3V.

Overall it will do fine at moderate listening levels but ideally it would be mated with fairly efficient 4 ohm speakers. Regardless, for close range listening it should be ok, I just wanted you to realize the true, lower output wattage you will have with it and that is with the real TA2021, if it is a clone/fake chip then it might work ok, or it might not tolerate as much heat or sound as good.

Also while these amps are efficient enough they do not produce much heat unless continuously playing loud music, the amp casing has no ventilation at all. The 5 electrolytic caps adjacent the chip heatsink may degrade over time or vent. It would seem a shame to put the case floor and lid on a drill press to add vent holes but I think I'd do it anyway marking a pattern for regular spacing so it didn't look as ghetto, then maybe coloring in the silver walled holes with a black sharpie marker, or putting masking tape over them on the outside and spraying black paint on from the inside.

I overlooked something previously. It's not a good ideal to use an unregulated 12VDC rated power brick over about 500mA (if that) on these. At very light loads the power rail may rise a bit above 16.0V while 16V is the absolute max the chip is spec'd for (lower 14.6V is max for operating conditions).

It's not hard to have a very light load with these class T amps, once I measured the current at a listening level higher than I'd want for most near field uses and with not especially efficient speakers and still it was under 400mA. On the other hand people have done so without letting the magic smoke out but it would still be good to measure the input voltage during a quiet or no-source situation to see how high the voltage rises with an unregulated PSU.

There's TA2024 amps for under $10 shipped if someone is hesitant about trying Tripath amps. (BTW, I haven't received any offers of Viagra when buying from eBay sellers in China.) The wattage may not sound like much, but it's almost exactly the same as a "high power" car head unit, and those are capable of bass you can feel with the right speakers. (Read the specs or reviews carefully, and you'll see that even a name-brand "40 watt" deck is more like 12W RMS.) I'm using one for my computer speakers, powered by a 12V adapter I found in a gravel pit.

Audio fanatics have been quite impressed by Tripath amps. Check out DIYaudio.com